Companies Take Costly Steps to Secure Laptops
About 88 million Americans have been exposed to the threat of identity theft since February 2005 because of recent data breaches, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. One-fourth of the incidents involved stolen or missing laptops. This has led several large U.S. companies to take action to secure laptops in an emerging mobile work environment. Ernst & Young has encrypted data on its laptops after an employee's laptop was stolen, and Fidelity recently took similar steps by encrypting thousands of its laptops, as well as training employees on laptop protection and security. Companies now have the challenge of trying to balance the financial costs of securing data, while protecting customer privacy. "There is a trade-off between the cost of security and how much security you actually get," says Sentillion CEO Robert Seliger. Bob Egner at Pointsec Mobile Technologies says laptops are becoming prime targets for identity thieves because more people are storing data in them. Thieves sell personal information over the Internet for about $1 per record, says Egner. The bad news is that the cost of encryption is not cheap. It can cost a company with 100,000 customer accounts between $30 and $40 per laptop for data encryption, according to Gartner.
© Copyright 2006 INFORMATION, INC.
Print This Article
E-mail This Article
